Joshua Vides says The Fast and The Furious changed his life. Growing up in San Bernardino, California, he’d always liked cars, but seeing F&F as a 12-year-old in 2001 broadened his horizons. “It was like, oh my God, I can put a light under my car?”
One can see that inspirational cars-made-cartoons F&F energy in Vides’s recent pop-up show, Check Engine Light. It featured three black-and-white-painted cars in an equally black-and-white world, flattening and compressing the physical into a two-dimensional environment. The outcome is mind-bending in photos as the viewer struggles to process what their eyes are transmitting. The effect is even more disorienting in person because you know it’s a car, you know it’s real, and yet the image of a comic strip dominates your thinking.
Vides calls the technique Reality to Idea (RTI). It’s the culmination of a style that he’s been refining for years. “It’s taking everything back to its original sketch.”
A pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes were the catalyst in catapulting Vides into a full-time artist. Ten years before Check Engine Light, he came across the Nike designer’s original sketch for the shoes, and hand-painted a pair in the RTI black-and-white motif. He uploaded the photo to his Instagram [@ joshuavides], which at the time had around 6000 followers [currently 197K and counting]. The shoes proved to be a hit, his Instagram count skyrocketed, and Vides would go on to produce several more versions of the shoes.
But even as his shoe experiment firmly placed Vides and RTI on the map, Vides was looking ahead. He wanted to use the technique to create something that could be appreciated on a larger, more experiential scale. “[I said], what else can I involve? Maybe I should paint a car.”
The sheetmetal canvas arrived in the form of a friend’s 1992 Acura NSX. “I called him up, said, ‘You cool if we wrap your car and paint it?’ And he said, ‘Dude, go for it.'” The Acura’s iconic shape proved to be the ideal challenge for Vides as he sought to soften and flatten the sculpted lines into a rolling sketch.
The result looks like an early draft of NSX designer Masahito Nakano’s original vision. The execution is intentionally rough-hewn and imperfect. Black brush strokes travel across the white backdrop in varying degrees of width and pressure, occasionally succumbing to gravity in drips and dribbles down vertical surfaces. Later, the NSX was the star of its own exhibit The Garage, which attracted thousands of people to the gallery—and hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram.
Vides could have never predicted what came next. “BMW called me and said, ‘We saw the NSX, and we love it. Have you heard of our Art Car program?’ I said, ‘Of course. Lichtenstein, Warhol, Stella.’ And they said, ‘Would you like to be a part of that?’ And now I have my X4 M sitting next to Lichtenstein’s E30 in Germany.”
Vides was still riding high from that collaboration when another call came in—this time from Maranello. “Ferrari comes to me and says, ‘Hey, do you want to design the F1 car for the Vegas race?’ It’s like, how do you say no to that?” In addition to the livery, Vides also designed the wardrobe for the team. “Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are wearing my suits, and I get to meet them? It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”
As rewarding as these high-profile collaborations were for Vides, he hadn’t lost sight of his own personal ideas. Vides envisioned a more ambitious followup to The Garage. “I thought, it can’t look like the NSX. It can’t look like the BMW. If you look at the BMW Art Car, I have halftone, and then I put lines to make it seem like the car was moving.”
For Check Engine Light, Vides aimed to distill and sharpen the RTI concept even further. “For this show, I wanted to focus on the glare. If this thing was sitting out in the sun, what would it look like?”
In choosing which cars to feature, Vides went back to his childhood. “I was born in ’89, so which ’90s vehicles would hit the hardest?” The [Honda Civic] EF hatchback was so attainable. And you’d see ’em all over the place. The [Mercedes-Benz] SL500 was more of kind of a drug dealer car, right? It’s like, damn, he always has money. He got girls. They usually were pushing the SL500 with the monoblocks.” And the Porsche 911? Vides got even more specific and channeled his six-year-old self. “It was the highest point of a dream of owning a vehicle.”
The 1990s also saw advanced emissions controls, and these well-intentioned microprocessors also tend to be extremely sensitive, much to the consternation of today’s car enthusiast. Vides saw the perfect title for the show right there on his dashboard. “The stress behind the love is crazy, right? It’s like, oh shit, I’ve got to smog this car, or my check engine light is on. The headaches that we go through for the love of these vehicles, they’re like soulmates. I could have called it ’90s Car Show, but that’s not that fun, right?”
Now that the show is over, he’s dismantling the physical Check Engine Light set, although the images will live on. The Honda and the Porsche will be returned to the friends who donated them to the show. “I offered to take the wrap off and paint-correct for them, but as of now they’ve requested to keep it on.”
As for the SL500? “I think I’ll cut out [the wrap on] the windows and lights and drive it around for a while. Should be fun.”
Sounds like something 12-year-old Joshua would love to see.
In his 20 years as a writer in the commercial, television, and feature world, Derek has worked on a wide array of projects with Emmy- and Oscar-winning directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn, Peter Berg, Morgan Spurlock, Stacy Peralta, Trish Sie, Davis Guggenheim, Lauren Greenfield and David Gelb. As a producer on Top Gear America, Derek is able to combine his love of cars and storytelling in one place. He’s also a freelance writer and onscreen host across a variety of mediums. In the print world, Derek explores the emotional connection that’s at the heart of every great car story. His features can be seen in Car and Driver, Autoweek, The Drive, European Car, Hagerty, and MotorTrend. Derek resides in Los Angeles. When he’s not writing, he is out at the racetrack, going off-roading, or building demolition derby cars with friends.
Source: www.caranddriver.com